The Herring Seller's Apprentice

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Why do you keep raising all of these objections?’ Elsie demanded. Nobody did narrowed eyes quite like her.

  ‘Because this is not a problem for us to solve. The police are already working on it. They have road blocks out there at this moment, questioning people going up to Cissbury Ring. They are going through databases of known criminals. They’re out fingerprinting the sheep for all I know. How can we compete with that, sitting in a pub with no chocolate?’

  ‘What would Fairfax say if he heard you now?’

  ‘He’d say quite right too. Fairfax has no time for amateur sleuths or for any policeman with less than thirty years’ experience.’

  ‘But just think if we solved this ahead of the Old Bill. Think what a book it would make.’

  ‘Who is this “we” of whom you so glibly speak? Don’t jump from the first person singular to the first person plural without checking there are at least two people with a desire to do some amateur sleuthing. From where I’m sitting, I can count only one – unless you are planning to join forces with Rupert. He also mentioned the word “we” in a similar connection, as I recall.’

  ‘Oh, come on … Ethelred … Red … Reddy Baby … I could be your apprentice. Please.’

  Hard-nosed and foul of tongue though Elsie might be under most circumstances, there was a distinct little-girly side to her – at least when it stood a better chance of success than other means.

  ‘Elsie, no.’

  ‘What if I said “pretty please”?’

  ‘I would not recommend it as a course of action likely to be successful.’

  ‘Oh, all right. But let’s just take a stroll up to Cissbury Ring, shall we? I could do with some exercise. Drink up, Tressider. You’re going walkies.’

  So, there it was. When pleading failed, she could always revert to ordering me around.

  The route from the Gun Inn to Cissbury Ring lies first along a road lined with low, bricky suburban bungalows, then skirts Nepcote Green’s willows and pretty flint cottages before climbing gradually but unrelentingly towards the broad skies and sheep-nibbled turf of the downs. When the road stops at the National Trust car park, the real scramble up to the iron-age fort begins.

  Elsie, whose training for events of this sort consisted of an evening in front of the television with a large box of Thornton’s Continental Selection, puffed a little as we climbed the last few steps and stood on the grassy rampart. The wind flapped against her unsuitable but undoubtedly fashionable robe. None of this however, for the moment, seemed to disconcert her.

  Sussex was rolled out before us, in every possible shade of green and brown, sweeping from one misty horizon to the other. Cloud shadows drifted over the rounded chalk escarpments and dipped capriciously in and out of dry valleys. In this vastness of earth and sky the works of man seemed insignificant pinpricks. Here and there the slopes were dotted with tiny white sheep. In a field below, what appeared to be a toy tractor chugged backwards and forwards, harrowing or drilling or gleaning or whatever one does in a tractor in the autumn. The idea that it might have been a child’s toy was accentuated by its bright primary colours – blue, red, yellow – in a landscape of leaf and earth. The thought of Geraldine on her (alleged) long walk away from West Wittering car park again flashed briefly in front of me.

  The September air had as yet no trace of winter’s hardness and the smell of the warm damp soil wafted up to us from the newly ploughed fields. Summer was still giving way reluctantly to autumn. The harvest was in. Soon leaves would start to dry, redden and fall. It was a scene to inspire anyone with poetic thoughts.

  ‘Well, one thing’s sodding well certain,’ said Elsie. ‘Your missus was done in up here. Nobody would drag a body up a slope like that.’

  ‘There might have been a gang of them,’ I reminded her mischievously. ‘The robber band dividing the loot amongst themselves by moonlight.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Tressider. Do get a grip,’ said Elsie. ‘Now, let’s see if we can find out where the body was discovered.’

  This too seemed unlikely, but on the flat ground in the centre of the ring we found small pieces of blue-and-white plastic tape hanging from a bush, indicating that the police had recently cordoned the area off. It was in one of the many rough, bramble-filled depressions that pockmark the site – old flint workings that pre-date even the construction of the earth ramparts. Originally they would have been thirty foot deep or more, but now they offer at best only a temporary hiding place for an unwanted corpse.

  ‘Not where I would choose to hide a body if I wanted it to stay hidden,’ said Elsie, echoing my own thoughts. ‘But good enough for a day or two while you put a few miles between yourself and the West Sussex Police.’

  ‘So you don’t think that it was planned?’

  ‘Spur-of-the-moment job, in my opinion.’ She puffed out her chest as she said it. She was getting into being a herring seller’s apprentice.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘There can be no doubt that your wife was planning to do a runner with other people’s cash. Before she could make her getaway somebody stopped her, killed her, took the bunce – and all of her ID – and left the body here. The business of the car at West Wittering is a red herring that somebody has planted to throw us off the scent. Mark my words.’

  ‘I see,’ I smiled. ‘So, you think that in real life criminals have the leisure to plant red herrings?’

  ‘All right, I’m no more certain than you are; but don’t try to adopt that bloody superior tone with me, Ethelred Tressider, until you’re selling over ten thousand copies in hardback. Until then I’m as entitled to my views as you are. Now, let’s list the suspects.’ She deposited her round little body on a bench, and pointedly ignored the splendid view that lay in front of her and below her. ‘There’s Rupert, obviously, the dumped boyfriend. There’s Elizabeth, dumped wife of the afore-mentioned chinless loser, equally obviously. You say that Charlotte was also not exactly on good terms with her sister, so we add her to the list. Then there’s Mr X.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Whoever she was planning to do a runner with. There must have been somebody.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Jesus! Which of us is the sodding crime writer? Because Geraldine never dumped one man before she had moved on to the next. If she got rid of Rupert, it figures that there was somebody else.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Get real, Ethelred … please? In case you have forgotten, your ex-wife was a Grade One Listed slut. She was a floozy of architectural and historic importance. This is a simple case of cherchez le bloke. Identify Mr X and the case is halfway to being solved.’

  ‘Geraldine isn’t … wasn’t … like that,’ I said. ‘She might sometimes have given the impression … but you never really knew her.’

  ‘I knew her well enough. How many men do you think she’d had affairs with before she finally left you for that idiot?’

  ‘Affairs? None at all,’ I said. ‘It was just Rupert.’

  Elsie shook her head sadly, then suddenly stood up and smoothed down the front of her robe with a quick movement of her palms. ‘If that’s what you want to believe, Ethelred.’ For a moment she looked at me almost tenderly – goodness knows why. Then she rubbed her hands together. ‘Now, what time does that village post office close? I have an appointment with a half-pound bar of Cadbury’s finest hazelnut.’

  And we set off, each lost in our own thoughts, down the hill, then onwards to the post office and (for one of us at least) the absolute certainty of chocolate.

  Six

  My fear is not that I shall one day look back on the last half-dozen years as dreary and utterly wasted. My fear is that one day I shall look back on them as the best days of my life.

  But of course, it could be, and has been, much worse. Much worse. When Geraldine walked out on me, one of the many things that friends said to comfort me was that two people as selfish and self-centred as her and Rupert would never be able to stay together for
long. This proved, by modern standards at least, to be somewhat wide of the mark. They remained together for just over ten years. But even at the beginning, I could have told my well-meaning comforters that they were wrong.

  Though Rupert appeared, on casual inspection, to be utterly tied up in Rupert, his selfishness was of a studied and, ultimately, totally artificial kind – a mere facade. ‘Mere’ however does not do justice to the facade that Rupert created over the years. It was a facade of such depth, a facade with so much apparent solidarity, that those who knew him only casually frequently mistook it for the real thing.

  Once one had penetrated a layer or two of this remarkable edifice, he could be disarmingly honest about its construction. Rupert on one occasion said to me, ‘For every affectation I have, I can date precisely, sometimes to the minute, when I acquired it and who I acquired it from. Some of my secondary mannerisms are taken from literature, but I like to work directly from nature if possible. Take the way I write the letter P, for example – that was copied from somebody at prep school, whom I greatly admired at the time. I never liked his Bs, however, which are from another source entirely. Many of my very best mannerisms are from my old Latin master, who had once been in the West African colonial service. It may look pretty easy to be me, but I can assure you that you have to work like a black to do it properly.’

  From which real or imaginary person he had copied the air of self-centredness, I never did find out, but it was no more than the first outer layer of the pseudo-Rupert, and most people who knew him penetrated it quite early on. Though Rupert was undeniably quite capable of using people to achieve his ends, he could also show surprising generosity. He would lend people money, his clothes, his car, with quite genuine unconcern for their ultimate return. To lend Geraldine £200,000 – if he had it – would have been an extreme example of this trait, but no more than that. Though it was unclear where Rupert would have laid his hands on that type of money, it never occurred to me, in the days and months that followed, to question even once the veracity of his claim. It was part of the pattern. In his way he genuinely cared about people. After his failure to ask me to be his best man he quickly compensated for this lapse by assuring me that I would be godfather to his and Elizabeth’s first child. That they chose not to have children did not lessen, in his eyes or mine, the honour that he was trying to bestow on me.

  Geraldine’s self-centredness too was not entirely straightforward. It was the selfishness of a small child who knows what she wants, and it was as easy to forgive as that of a small child. She wanted everything in the shop window. Nobody had ever quite found a way of explaining that this would not be possible.

  More often than not she got her way, even when the odds seemed stacked against it. She had, for example, a phobia about dentists, and never visited one, to my knowledge, during her adult life. But her teeth were always immaculate. Whether this was just one of many examples of life’s unfairness or whether Geraldine simply took great care of her teeth, I cannot truly say – but an unexpected side of her character was her single-minded determination when she really wanted to achieve something. Perhaps that too was child-like in a sense.

  She certainly had a child’s impulsiveness. There was little that so typified her approach to life as the way that she played chess. A careful build-up over half a dozen moves would be thrown away with one wild speculative dash across the board by her queen or one of her bishops. The inevitable losses of matériel that quickly followed would cause her to throw in rooks, knights and pawns in one glorious suicidal charge, each doomed piece being slammed down in a way that might have led a casual observer to believe that some grand plan lay behind the massacre and that the sole surviving bishop would miraculously achieve mate on its own. Then, when it was clear even to Geraldine that all was lost, she would sweep her fingers imperiously through the pieces, black and white, and demand another game. That the first game had not counted was taken as read. Geraldine always liked to start with a clean slate, however grubby she had made her previous one.

  That was why none of the theories about Geraldine’s disappearance could be entirely discounted by anyone who knew her well. The whole plan to abscond, the hired car, the suicide note – even at a pinch Geraldine tottering around West Wittering in red Italian high-heeled shoes – could all have been things which, for a moment or two, simply looked like a good idea. But equally one could not assume that everything had been done on a rash impulse. It was important to remember that the positions that she threw away had first to be built up. She was capable, when she chose, of careful, meticulous calculation and even, as a last resort, of sustained hard work.

  Had I wanted to play detectives, and I most certainly did not, the one major advantage that I would have had over the police was a detailed knowledge of the character of Geraldine Tressider. Only Rupert, arguably, might have had a better one. But neither of us seemed to feel inclined, for the moment, to share that knowledge with those who were busy investigating Geraldine’s murder.

  On the day that Elsie took me for a stroll up to Cissbury Ring a further small part of the jigsaw was put in place. It was another phone call that placed this piece in my hands. This one was from Dickinson’s – my wife’s solicitors. They had at one time been mine and hers, but they handled the divorce on her behalf and relations between Tim Dickinson and myself had been somewhat distant ever since.

  ‘Ethelred,’ said the voice at the London end of the telephone. ‘Good to talk to you again, though I would have preferred it was under other circumstances. I guess it was a while since you and Geraldine had seen each other, but my condolences, nevertheless. It must be tough for you.’

  ‘Thank you for your condolences, Tim,’ I said. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘It’s about Geraldine’s will … slightly odd, but you still seem to be her executor, at least in the latest version that we have.’

  ‘We made wills when we were still married. I guess that she never updated hers. She had no particular plans to die and so would not have given it a very high priority.’

  ‘Yes … well, you remain the executor and the main beneficiary. Not, I fear, that you stand to inherit a great deal. Geraldine involved me quite closely in her business dealings and pretty well everything she had was security for one loan or another. And the business …’

  ‘… was going down the plug hole.’

  ‘Yes, you could put it like that. I assume you don’t have a copy of the will?’

  ‘Any reason why you think I should?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. I’ll send you a photocopy. You’ll need to get access to the flat and so on; I’m not sure how.’

  ‘I have keys,’ I said. There was silence at the other end of the phone. ‘It used to be my flat too,’ I pointed out, ‘until you took it away from me.’

  ‘So it was,’ he said. ‘Now look, if we can be of any help in sorting out the estate or Geraldine’s business affairs, please let me know.’

  ‘Thank you. At a price, presumably.’

  ‘I’m a solicitor,’ he said. ‘Everything is at a price. Ha ha. You might, however, like to think about it. We had a call from Mr Rupert Mackinnon, by the way, your late wife’s … er … partner. He seemed to think that he should be the executor and indeed beneficiary of Geraldine’s will.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I’m only repeating what he told us.’

  ‘I can see why he might think that.’

  ‘If there’s any doubt that there might be a later will somewhere naming Mr Mackinnon as executor we could always delay …’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no other will and I’m the only executor.’

  ‘If you’re sure …’

  ‘Quite sure,’ I said.

  Seven

  Every wise man knows that there are occasions when it is inadvisable to tell his wife the entire truth. There are certain questions – ‘How much did you have to drink last night?’ ‘How much did that cost?’ ‘Your new secretary’s quite dishy, isn’t
she?’ – that the alert husband will quickly realize may represent traps if answered in a frank and uninhibited fashion.

  There is less need to dissemble to one’s agent, though many authors I know seem to have problems with the question, ‘Exactly when will the manuscript be ready?’

  But one cannot lie to one’s readers, particularly when it comes to crime writing. There is a standard of honesty to be maintained that runs strangely contrary to the murky subject matter. Above all, the reader must be given a fair chance to identify the murderer by (say) three-quarters of the way through the book, and the murderer cannot be some obscure character glimpsed briefly in chapter seven and never mentioned again.

  This need for honesty occasionally runs against realism. For example, some of my more villainous characters, who would sell their own grandmothers, prove strangely incapable of telling a direct lie. When, for example, in Thieves’ Honour, Ginger McVitie denies categorically that he paid Alf Jones to carry out a murder, the emphasis proves to be on the word ‘paid’: Jones has actually been blackmailed into carrying out the job. When my characters do tell a direct lie, they are usually offering the reader, in a quite generous fashion, the chance to spot an inconsistency between their statement and known facts.

  This does not mean, of course, that one cannot lay endless trails of red herring in the path of the reader. As Geraldine had implied, these are, if not my stock in trade, at least a serviceable instrument that always sits in the toolbox of the crime writer. But they must be used with care to lead the reader off in a desired direction for a desired amount of time, not scattered randomly throughout the text. Nor are they the only tool in the box.

  Clues must also obviously be provided: most openly, others half concealed in some throw-away line at the end of a section. I have sometimes been accused of providing too many clues too early on, but I am well aware that clues must be carefully doled out so that, while nobody can solve the mystery before the middle of the book, everyone has the chance of getting there before the final page.